Holly Mason Reviews Oliver Baez Bendorf's Advantages of Being Evergreen

University of Arizona Poetry Center's blog, 1508, hosts Holly Mason's close reading of Oliver Baez Bendorf's Advantages of Being Evergreen, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Poetry Competition. Reviewing Bendorf's poems, Mason writes that the book "is a soft, powerful, seasonal-transition kind-of-read." More: 

...Throughout, there also seems to be an exploration of identity and the way beings hold abundance in one space, in one body. Again, Evergreen: limitlessness. There are poems like “My Body The Haunted House” with lines like “I carry your body (in/ my body). I live for both of us now.” Followed by the stilling fragment, “Cannot pinpoint what I miss,” which resonates and speaks both specifically and universally. How accurate—how we often find ourselves lacking clarity and how that is part of this human experience.

Some poems have the “feels” of confessional poets past, but with an O’Hara-esque immediacy, intimacy, and inviting yet withholding-ness. Specific names are dropped. Bendorf engages the reader, including phrases like: “know what I mean?” and “you know?” There is a group or collective “we” who feels the same in some poems and perhaps shifts in others—lines like “we took family portraits wearing animal masks” and later in the same poem “So many gay bodies on fire, offerings to/ gods who don’t deserve us.”  This idea of connection and collective is also at the heart of this book. Though the lines above may not directly speak to the 2016 Ghost Ship tragedy, a number of poems in this book mourn that massive loss.

Continue reading at 1508.